Online streaming media services, such as online radio, streaming music services, and streaming movie services, appeal to end users' preferences for the instant accessibility of media content, portability, and convenience. Such services increasingly work across multiple devices and settings, allowing the same streaming content at a desktop computer at home, at a smart phone during a car commute, or at any other device and virtually any location. These services are also capable of drawing a vast library of streaming content via a network connection and presenting it in a number of possible ways. Such streaming media services also appeal to advertisers or content providers by providing opportunities to access specific, captive audiences. Advertisers typically provide invitational content, such as a product or service advertisement, that is selected to appear within a pod of invitational content. This pod of content is played in certain intervals between pieces of media content, or in the middle of a single piece of media content.
These ad breaks, or “ad pods”, as they are sometimes referred to, are a traditional model of advertising that has also been employed on both the television and radio formats for decades. The “ad pod” is a construct whereby media broadcasters can insert a commercial break containing a sequence of ads into a block of programming. Each commercial break or ad break can contain one or more sequential ads which play up until the duration of the ad pod, after which the primary content the user was seeing or hearing is resumed.
Ad pods are often seen as a difficult and ineffective way to engage users. Users that were previously focused on media content are wary once the pod begins, and tend to either lose interest and engagement after the first advertisement in the pod, concentrate on something else, or skip the ad pod completely if such a function is available. With the advent of such technologies as Digital Video Recorders (DVRs), new user interfaces and ad bypassing methods, it is more likely that a user will skip an ad pod than in the past. At the same time, the benefits of the traditional ad pod—monetization for advertisers and the streaming service provider—continue to be crucial.